Kantaly!

Some photos of my favorite people in Kantaly,as well as some photos of people in Kantaly who I don't even know.

One of my grade eleven students

Kid I don't know, Buba, E.B.

Two kids I don't know

More kids I don't know.

Buba's so big now!

The girl in the middle is Sona, I told her she's almost my American-name tokara.

Don't know these kids.

Sona again. My fingers keep wanting to type a "j"

Sona

Another Buba.

Buba and E.B. and some background children

20 girls and a football

The school’s sports department organized a football tournament. At one of the games between the girls I made note of what they wore, which probably reveals everything about everything.

• 20 girls
• Over 20 pairs of earrings
• 10 headwraps
• 18 jerseys
• 2 pairs of gym shorts, 1 pair of men’s bathing trunks, 2 skirts (the rest of the girls wore either rhinestone-studded leggings, skinny jeans, pajama bottoms, or capris)
• 3 pairs of shoes
• 2 pairs of socks
• 0 shin guards

And 1 unhappily inflated football.

Barbie!

Little Susanna handed me the head of a beheaded imitation Barbie doll. Not only had she been beheaded, but all of her hair had been ripped out.

I asked, “What is this?”
 “A doll.”
“But…no hair.”
“Yes, it’s clean. It shaved.”

A Legendary Shrew

I went to Kantaly and Fatou Sowe retold the “Binta is scared of mice” story, now a year and half old and quite a bit different from how I remember it. Fatou was reminded of the story because the kids were pulling down their lower eyelids to “scare” me and one thought of another thing that scares me: mice! I specified: mice alone will not scare me, but if a mouse is eating a frog…

Then Fatou needed to tell the story, because the women from Kantaly had never heard it.

Here is the latest version of the story: There was a mouse in Binta’s house, behind the trunks, and she thought it was a snake. She ran outside screaming, “Neene, Neene! There’s a snake in my house! I’m scared!” So Neene went inside and Binta said, “Look, the snake is eating a mouse,” no, wait, she said, “the snake is eating a frog.” And Neene said, “That’s not a snake, Binta, that’s a mouse.”

The end.

Seriously?! Who confuses a mouse with a snake?? Future volunteers are going to hear that story and think, “Wow. That Binta Jallow sure was dumb.”

Hanging out with the Kantaly kids

First Impressions of a Mad Woman

First impressions of a mad woman. A neighbor girl told me she remembers when I first came to village.

"You had Rasta hair."
"Yes! You remember?"
"And when you talked you always moved your arms like this, like someone who is mad"

"The Year in Review"

I flipped through “The Year in Review” issue of Time with New Isatou, who is maybe eleven years old. Since I can’t show you the photos, I’ll refer to them by their captions.

“The Year in Review” with Isatou:

Protestors rally in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Feb. 25
“Football?”
“No, government.”

The world roared its approval as Britain’s Prince William…wed commoner Kate Middleton.
 “Girl. Boy.”

…a supporter of Egypt’s President, Hosni Mubarek, rides a camel into Cairo’s Tahrir Square…
 “Horse?”
“It’s not a horse. I don’t know in Pulaar. In English it’s ‘camel.’”
“Look the ‘camel’ is doing this, look at the person, the camel will kick the person…”
Then follows an exciting story—so exciting I couldn’t follow it—about a couple of horses.

Gwyneth Paltrow
“Beyoncé?”
“Who?”
“Beyoncé?”
“Gwyneth Paltrow.”

Jennifer Aniston
“Who?”
“Jennifer Aniston.”
“Jennifer Aniston.”

 Miley Cyrus
“Who?”
“Miley Cyrus.”
“Miley Cyrus.”

Two pages later…
“This is her?” Isatou asks while flipping back and pointing to the photo of Jennifer Aniston.
“No, this is Maria Shriver.”

Battles between Congress and the White House send public approval of the government into free-fall
“Hep. No girls.”

The next page…
“No girls.”

The next page…
Me: “A girl.”
“Ah-ha! I’m happy! And here? Who?”
“Sarah Palin.”
“Sarah Palin.”

More Milestones for U.S. Gays
“They’re happy!”

A boy in the newly independent nation of South Sudan faces the future on July 9
“I’m scared.”

Antigovernment protestors rally in the streets in Nawa, near Dara’a, southern epicenter of the uprising that rocked the nation throughout the year.
“A child.”
“Yes, and here, a child.”
“But no girls.”

More frightening photos (a burning poster of Gaddafi, riots in the U.K.) that we move quickly past. She slows down at the photos of Ai Weiwei and Wael Ghonim, but “No girls.”

Then a sigh of relief because it’s back to Prince William and Kate Middleton.
“Look at her hat,” I say and point to a photo of Princess Beatrice.
“It’s not pretty.”
“But this one is pretty,” I say, pointing to a lavender hat.
“Yes, but all of these…” she waves her hands over the photographs of the hats “are not pretty. All of them have too much foom, foom, foom.” Her hand motions feathers, flowers, curls of ribbon… When a Gambian thinks your outfit has too much “foom foom foom” you know you’ve gone overboard.

Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand
Me: “She is president.”
“What?”
“She will govern.”
“She is beautiful.”
“Yes.”

Famine Stalks Somalia
Me: “They didn’t eat. They don’t have rice.”
“That’s why they are crying, crying. Here,” speaking now to the mother and child in the photo, and holding out her hand as if offering food, “eat.”

Photos of tsunami, earthquake, hurricane and tornado damage are commented on with sympathetic clucks, but she closes her eyes at the photo of a Texas wildfire. I don’t notice that she’s closed her eyes until I turn to see why she’s struggling to turn the page. Luckily the next page has some innocuous photos of eggs, milk, head lice, a soccer player, a doctor… We discuss our shared dislike of needles.

The Stanley Cup
“He is training.”
“Yes.”
“Over there I saw a man doing this, he sat in a chair and did like this [she bench presses imaginary weights].”
“Where?”
“There.”
(the man, by the way, was not lifting weights, merely holding up a trophy)

A pair of young Mormon missionaries encounter a witch doctor in Uganda in The Book of Mormon
“A konkoran.”
“He put on a lot of straw.”
“Yes.”
“What is ‘konkoran’ in English?”
“I don’t know.”
“They are not in your country. Okay.”

Arianna Huffington
“You.”

Kristen Wiig
“You.” (kiss)

Steve Jobs is not interesting, or maybe just not a girl.

Elizabeth Taylor
“Ah-ha…”
“She is Elizabeth.”
“Lizabeta.”
“Yes.”
She kisses Lizabeta, pretends to scoop her out of the magazine, and then spreads her hands over and down her face, as if concluding a prayer.

Betty Ford
“Her?”
“Betty.”
“Betty.” (kiss)

Warren Christopher and Sargent Shriver get less than passing glances for not being girls.

Amy Winehouse
(kiss) Then, pointing to her lip piercing, “She pierced.”
“Yes.”
Then Isatou tells me a story about a girl who visited from France who had pierced her eyebrow two times, and her nose and her belly button.
“She didn’t stay long?” I ask.
“Just a week. Then she went to her country, I forget which country…America.”

After we finished “The Year in Review” she asked for another magazine so I brought out Glamour, figuring it would have more than enough girls to satisfy her. There must’ve been, because instead of pointing out the girls, she'd point and say, “you” or “me.” It didn’t matter if the model had any resemblance to our actual selves. Sometimes I was the black girl and she was the white girl, but always we were beautiful.

Who is this? I greet him.

I looked through an issue of Time with the kids. They want me to greet the following people when I return to America:

• Kristen Wiig
• Justin Timberlake
• Lord Voldemort
• Amy Winehouse
• Dirk Nowitzki
• the participants in the Day of Giants surfboat race in Auckland, N.Z.
• Rob Bell
• Amy Chua
• and the boy whose photograph accompanied the article “A Genetic Link for Depression.”

Brains are best.

I ate brains. Sheep brains. I wasn’t planning on having a “brains I’ve eaten list,” but I guess it’s too late now. I also wasn’t planning on eating the sheep brains, and I didn’t particularly want to because:

1.  The day before my vacation to Morocco seemed a poor time to sample new foods
2.  I could determine no reason why we would’ve slaughtered a sheep, which means the reason was probably: it was horribly ill.

After dinner, Jainabou brought out a bowl filled with roasted pieces of sheep. Unfortunately, the bowl only contained those pieces you’d least want to eat, most of them unidentifiable. Actually, the only pieces I could identify were four hooves and a skull. Everything else was fatty, goopy, and charred. I probably would’ve had trouble classifying them even if I were familiar with ovine* internal anatomy. I hadn’t been told to “eat” that frequently since I first arrived in village almost two years ago. I could only reply with a nod because my mouth was filled with the roasted innards. I’d been trying to store the “food” in my cheeks, chipmunk-style, so I could later spit it out in the privacy of my pit latrine.

After we’d each eaten a couple of handfuls, Amadou grinned and set to work cracking open the skull. He scooped out the brains—the best! he exclaimed—and handed me some. It seemed dangerous to trust the culinary tastes of someone who’d just been forcing burnt chunks of fat on me, but I took a chance…and it turns out Amadou was right! Brains are best! The brains were warm and had a comforting texture, somewhere between oatmeal and feta cheese. Having not been directly roasted, the brains were also cleaner in appearance than what I’d previously been eating and not covered in soot. Best of all, there were no clinging goopy dripping blobs of fat. But lets hope the sheep didn’t die of some zoonotic** neurological disease.

*Who knew? There actually is a use for this word.
**Google tells me this is the word referring to a diseases transmissible from animals to humans. I added this footnote so you wouldn’t think that’s a word normally floating about my vocabulary.

Chicken intestines, konkorans, a vampire, and other curiosities.

Jainabou cooked a chicken and gave Mamadou the intestines. Mamadou took them and walked away. I asked what he was doing. He didn't reply, but ten minutes later I was offered a piece of roasted intestine (that's what's wrapped around the stick). I accepted.

Mariama getting her hair plaited.

Konkoran!

KONKORAN!

No, I didn't tell Alieu to act like a vampire. He thought of that on his own, but I didn't even notice until I unloaded the photos from my camera.

Alhagie!

Woo-hoo! We're not chasing Levi away with a stick!

The imam.

Musa's helping his mom pound the millet.

Musa!

Gas station!

Only the first of these photos is of a gas station, but I'm pretty sure I've already used "Basse!" as the title for at least one previous post.

Most of these photos were taken early in the morning, hence the lack of people.

Yup. This is the gas station. It even has one of those convenience stores gas stations always have. This particular convenience store, however, is only convenient if you want to buy an icee.

There is absolutely nothing special about this particular portion of the road.

I have crossed the river at Basse exactly twice.

On the left is a church. On the right is a large bitik. In the middle is a man who probably thought I was photographing him.

This is the smelly road that leads to the metal-workers yard. There's also a non-smelly road leading there.

WELCOME TO FIJA JALA NIGHT CLUB THE ONLY & BEST IN TOWN

That's the elusive immigration post on the left.

And the even-more elusive Pharmacy Ous Camara

The car park with vehicles to Senegal. 

"A konkoran tore three pages."

Worokia told me she has a book so I asked to see it.

“You want to see it?”
“Yes. Where is it?”

She went into her mother’s house and returned with a 150-page book titled Rulings Pertaining to Muslim Women. She began flipping through the pages and “reading,” i.e. saying random numbers in English.

“Seven. Twelve. Go ahead, Binta, speak.”

She flipped to the front again, “The book is torn.”
 “Yes—who tore the page?”
“A konkoran. This page is also torn.”
“Yes.”
 “A konkoran tore three pages.”
“Only two. Look—one, two.”

And then the camera sputtered and died...

After the desert I didn't have much time for Marrakesh (a night and a morning) or Casablanca (an afternoon) before it was time to return to The Gambia. I've decided to think of it as saving things for next time.

I forgot! I do have a picture of Marrakesh! I photographed this McDonald's on my way to the bus station.

I also have a photograph of Casablanca from the day I arrived, also taken while walking to a bus station.

The camera was refusing to focus. Probably for the best, because who actually wants to view a clear and focused image of slaughtered animals?

And this, the final picture. After refusing me photographs of many breathtaking sights from the bus trip down steep and winding mountains, the camera granted me (sort of) my wish for a photograph of the snow. Snow!

I wanted to give a description of the Djemaa el-Fna square in Marrakesh, in lieu of photos, but decided this was impossible without resorting to all the over-used adjectives. Though I guess it's possible you won't have read as many articles about Morocco as I have and you wouldn't find the adjectives over-used. Regardless, I think you can get a pretty good picture of the market at night with this list of the sources of light:

• the setting sun, and later, the moon and stars
• the light bulbs above the food carts (illuminating pyramids of oranges, steaming pots of snails)
• the fluorescent tubes in the shops (illuminating racks of clothes, sunglasses)
• the electric signs (Telebotiqúe,Hôtel)
• the window with a boy sitting on the sill
• the top of the mosque
• the electric blue spinning toys being tossed into the air by vendors and children
• the headlamps of motorcycles
• the streetlamps
• the camera flashes
• the candles displayed in the candle holders for sale
• the wheels of the battery powered cars
• the candelabra-esque lamps in the lamp shops
• the screens and the blinking green lights of ATMs
• the bare bulbs above the hanging slabs of meat
• the strings of electric lights in paper star-shaped shades dangling from the second floor balconies of restaurants
• the fluorescent illumination of glass display cases (illuminating cellphones, wristwatches)

No, never mind. That's not even close to a pretty good picture.

M'hamid!

I only went to Tangier in order to take the night train to Marrakesh. Unfortunately, you won't see any photos of Marrakesh. The first time I went there I went straight to the bus station in order to get to Ourzazate, in order to get to Zagora, in order to get to M'hamid, in order to see the Sahara. The camera did not survive the Sahara, so I guess my memories of Marrakesh will remain mine alone. 

Waiting in Ourzazate for the grand taxi to fill.

The kasbah in M'hamid was old and crumbly in a beautiful way, but a surprising number of people were living in buildings I'd thought crumbled beyond habitability. Did you know habitability is an actual word? I thought I was making it up, but spell-check isn't complaining.

Camel!

After two days of walking, we arrived at the high dunes.

In the morning I traipsed through the dunes in my pajamas.

This is what the non-high-dunes part of the desert looked like.

On the way back we met a caravan of three camels, two French tourists, and several nomads. At first I thought the woman had no toes, but it turned out she actually had long toes curled into the sand. But if I ever write a story about my desert adventures, I would have to make it fiction so that the French woman could be missing her toes. Something else amusing was my conversation with the French man and the non-English-speaking nomads, which went something like this: "America? Obama! McDonald's! Coca-Cola!"

I rode a camel on the way back! Relatives, fear not, I also have pictures of me sitting on the camel. I just forgot to upload them. And I will probably continue forgetting to upload them, because I appear as an unattractive blob of blanket instead of the fierce commander of the desert I felt like.

One of the rooms at the camp where we left from and returned to.